New Defender's Study Bible Notes

4:3 Forbidding to marry. A false asceticism is promoted as more spiritual than normal Christianity. Two key heresies are emphasized, a pseudo-love and vegetarianism. The Christian doctrine of permanent monogamous marriage is replaced by various forms of erotic “love” and “loving relationships.” True marriage is considered by them as an outmoded and even repressive burden imposed by the Genesis myth of creation and its legalistic paraphernalia. The word “forbidding” can properly be translated as “discouraging” here. With the modern propaganda against the traditional family, Christian marriage may actually come to be forbidden in the foreseeable future. This latter-day trend is certainly in that direction.

4:3 abstain from meats. Similarly, the animal veneration practiced in the eastern pantheistic religions is being vigorously promoted today among nominal Christians, in the name of animal rights, holistic health, and evolutionary kinship with our animal “brothers and sisters.” The word “commanding” here is not in the original, but has been added by the translators. Both traditional marriage and eating of meat is being widely opposed today by almost all New Age cults and movements, as supposedly based on the scientific “fact” of evolution. All this is aimed at the disintegration of true Biblical faith.